The Beast has become a beauty for Springboks

FEW players get to announce their retirement off the back of possibly a career-best, World Cup-winning, performance but that is the happy place Tendai Mtawarira finds himself occupying this week as he enjoys the Springboks’ trophy tour of the Rainbow Nation.

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The Beast, 34, is stepping down from Test rugby after 117 caps, a mighty career which will also be celebrated in his native Zimbabwe where, as a star player with Churchill School and the elite Peterhouse College, he is undoubtedly their greatest rugby product.

Mtawarira finished as he started. On Saturday he monstered Dan Cole while the wider rugby world-first clocked him in 2009 when he tore into Phil Vickery, below, during the first Lions Test. Neither English prop was solely to blame – scrummaging is a collective effort and their respective scrums were malfunctioning badly – but both endured a miserable, chastening afternoon at The Beast’s hands.

When the histories get written and the role black Africans have played in South African rugby is properly chronicled, The Beast will be hailed as the man who dispelled the nonsensical apartheid-era notion that black South Africans didn’t make great tight forwards.